Codex Alexandrinus.  The third oldest of the great uncial codices is signified by the letter A, and dates from the early 5th century. This manuscript, with two columns per page, has a nearly complete Septuagint, missing only ten leaves. The New Testament, however, is missing a total of about 37 leaves, with the bulk of those (25) missing from Matthew. 773 leaves still exist (630 of the Septuagint, 143 of the New Testament), measuring 12 5/8 x 10 3/8 inches.  This manuscript was owned in 1625 by Cyril Lucar, then the Patriarch of Constantinople. It is unclear how Lucar, who was later killed by the order of the Sultan, acquired the text. A Calvinist and supporter of the Church of England, he sent the text to England as a gift to King James. It first came into the hands of George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, who had played a role in the translation of King James’ Bible.  Obviously alarmed at what he saw, he stalled the presentation of the manuscript. In fact, King James died before he ever got it, and it was finally presented two years later to King Charles I.

    This particular text was written in the 5th century, and had found its way into the hands of the Athonite monks of Egypt by the 10th century. Tradition holds that the text was written for Thecla, an Egyptian noble lady in 325 AD. This date, of course, is too early, but other evidence does point to an Alexandria, Egypt, origin.

    Codex Alexandrinus is particularly important to the study of New Testament Greek because it contains the best extant text of the Revelation, and for the Septuagint because it contains the oldest complete text of several Old Testament books as well.

    Other Important Uncials.  There are two other uncials that deserve separate mention. They are the manuscript of Ephraem and the Codex of Bezae. 

    The Codex of Ephraem (called Codex C) is a "palimpsest". This English word (from the Greek) means literally "rubbed again". One way for scribes to overcome a shortage of writing materials was to scrape the ink off of old documents and then to write over them again. Not a few old parchments have come down through the years like this, but this is the most important one relating to the Bible.

    To the right is I Timothy 3:16 from the Ephraemi Rescriptus, as the Latin name is given. It is possible to see both the cursive on the upper layer and the uncials on the lower layer.

    When the King James translators made their Bible in 1611, they certainly knew of the existence of Codex Ephraem, for it had been brought to Paris by Catherine de Medici (1519-1589). However, as far as they knew, it was just a 12th century copy of the theological writings of St. Ephraem, a Syrian church father from about 350 AD.

    It was not until 1834 that the famous Tischendorf applied a chemical treatment to the text and discovered that it was a palimpsest. Unfortunately, many of the leaves were ruined or thrown away, and today only 64 leaves of the Septuagint and 145 of the New Testament exist. It measures 12 1/4 x 9 inches, being written in a single column. No books of the New Testament are complete and II Thessalonians and II John are entirely missing. This manuscript today resides in the University Museum in Paris.

    The Codex of Bezae is another 5th century copy of the scriptures. In 1581, Theodore Beza presented this manuscript to the University of Cambridge where it has resided ever since. It is the earliest known Bible in two languages, Greek and Latin.  These two translations face each other, Greek on the left and Latin on the right. Its leaves are small (10 x 8 inches), so the pages have but one column. But what is truly interesting is that, in many cases, the Latin and Greek are in total disagreement! This manuscript is of little importance in actual translation, but is a curiously interesting document.

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    It will be important to remember later when we discuss the King James Bible that this is the only uncial of the five that was available to the translators of the KJV. The Vatican manuscript was hidden in the Vatican library, the Sinaitic manuscript was hidden in Saint Catherine’s monastery, the Alexandrian manuscript was received in England about 17 years after they had finished their work, and the Ephraemi manuscript was still thought to be a 12th century poetry book.

    Lectionaries.  Among evidences of the New Testament are a group of materials called lectionaries. The term "lection" refers to a passage selected for use in the public worship service, and a lectionary is a manuscript prepared especially for this purpose.  They cannot be called either uncial or cursive because they are both depending on who the scribe was. Studies have shown that lectionaries appeared to be copied a bit more carefully than, for example, ostraca, which were mainly writing exercises. There have been more than 1,800 lectionaries documented to this date.

    Other Versions.  In addition to the Syriac versions that have already been discussed, there were other old versions (or translations) of the Bible that are of great value in determining the "canon" of the scripture.

    The Old Latin version was probably made sometime in the 2nd century, about 150 A.D. when all of the original church fathers had died and the autographs had disappeared.  This version was made for use by Roman citizens who spoke Latin and for those churches in which Latin was the predominant language. Old Latin is represented by about 20 copies, not including fragments. Some of the Old Latin parchments are well known and are considered important because they reach back almost to the beginning of the church and the writing of the original manuscripts of the New Testament.

    The Latin Vulgate deserves special mention, not because of its accuracy or lineage, but because of the use which was made of it.

    As the centuries after the resurrection unfolded, the dominant language spoken in the Roman Empire began to change. No longer was Greek the dominant language. The Old Latin Bible had been widely copied and circulated but had not been carefully maintained. There were many errors in the copies that existed. Something had to be done to prevent the spread of corruption. Therefore, in 382, Pope Damascus commissioned Jerome (c. 347-420) to translate the Bible into Latin, a task which took him  twenty years to complete. Jerome was well qualified for this task and completed his translation of the Gospels in 384. Sometime later, (time unknown), he completed the rest of the New Testament. This Bible came to be known as the versio vulgata (common translation) and became standard for the Western Church. In English, we call this Bible the Vulgate.

    What followed was a 1,000 year reign of the Vulgate in the West. While scholars in the East were feverishly trying to maintain the scriptures in Greek, Western scribes were attempting to do the same in Latin. It is not surprising to know that there are over 10,000 existing copies of the Latin Vulgate.

    For 1,000 years, virtually every translation was based on the Vulgate. The first book printed with movable type by Johannes Gutenberg was the Vulgate. The Vulgate became the official Bible of the Roman Catholic Church and so remains today.  The Roman Catholic Bible in English is actually a translation of a translation, not a translation from the original. Even the King James Version reflects the Vulgate to a greater degree than most would suspect.

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    Church Fathers.  We are fortunate to have a large number of writings from the early church fathers, who quote extensively from the scriptures that they used. They lived near the end of the first century and their quotations from early copies and perhaps from some of the autographs bear witness to the accuracy of our translations today.  There are literally libraries full of books by these old Christians, filled with scripture that reflects the Bible used by those in their day.

    It would be interesting to talk of just three who have had the greatest impact on the text and why they have had such an impact. 

    Tertullian was born at Carthage, in Africa, about the year 150 A. D. His father was a Roman centurion and Tertullian was well-educated. Philosophy, history, and law were subjects in which he took much delight. He grew up to manhood before his conversion to Christianity, and was probably forty years of age before that important event took place.  He was a man of profound mind, ardent and deep feeling, and a voluminous writer. This lawyer made great use of the New Testament. He ascribes the four Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. His known works have been carefully examined, and it is found that he makes 2,500 references to the New Testament. Of these 700 are references to the Gospels, and of these, again, 200 are to the Gospel by John. He quotes from every chapter in Matthew, Luke and John. He was the first to introduce the phrase "New Testament," and the first of the fathers who wrote in Latin.

    Irenæus was another type of man who lived in another part of the world and had entirely different surroundings. He was probably born in the year 130 A. D. and was a native of Asia Minor. He had the advantage of being a disciple of Papias and Polycarp, the disciples and friends of the Apostle John. It is not quite clear how or when he came to leave his birthplace, but we know him chiefly for his connection with the Christian church at Lyons. He was presbyter of the church there during the time of a fierce persecution under Marcus Aurelius the Roman Emperor. The aged bishop of the church, named Ponthinus, died in prison in the year 177, and Irenæus succeeded him. In his writings he used the New Testament regularly. He attributes the four Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. He argues that there were four and could be no more than four Gospels. In his known works he makes twelve hundred references to the New Testament. Of this number four hundred are to the Gospels; he makes eighty references to the Gospel of John alone.

    In Alexandria, we find Clement. The early history of the church in Alexandria is not very certain. Tradition has said that Mark was the founder this city noted for its scholars, its library, and its university. Christianity early took root in this city, and famous Christian schools were established. Clement was probably born about the year 165 A. D.  Like Tertullian, he grew to manhood before he became a Christian. He was a great scholar, and presided over a most famous school of. Within one hundred years of the death of the Apostles of our Lord, he was working and teaching, and accepted as genuine and authentic the Gospels as we accept them. He mentions Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John by name, and places them in that. He makes three hundred and twenty references to the New Testament in his works.

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    The Text.  As said before, there are no original manuscripts in existence. There is no document of Ephesians that is signed, "Sincerely, Paul". We have only copies of copies.  And since man is prone to error, there have been many, many discrepancies arise over the two thousand years since the last of the original manuscripts was penned.

    Even with modern printing, errors arise. More than 300 errors in the first edition of the King James Bible of 1611 were corrected in the second edition in 1613. And if it is easy to see how error creeps into modern printing, it is even easier to see how error crept unnoticed into the earlier versions of the bible.

    The presence of error in the text has given rise to a peculiar science known as textual criticism. There are two forms of this science. "Higher" criticism deals with such subjects as authorship, date of writing, and historical value, while "lower" criticism deals simply with the form of the text itself. The function of this science is simple; the textual critic seeks, by comparison of all of the available evidence, to recover the exact text that was in the original manuscript. In the Old Testament, he is dealing with the Hebrew text and in the New Testament, he is dealing with the Greek text. Why? Why not deal with English? Because, in order for the English to be valid, the underlying and original Hebrew or Greek must be accurate.

    Mistakes of copyists.  In order to preserve an aging and deteriorating document or to make an additional copy, a scribe was employed to copy the contents of the original onto a new surface. The scribe was paid according to the quality of the work and by the number of lines. A single scribe most likely read aloud to himself as he copied from the exemplar (the original) to the new document. In a scriptorium, the ancient "copy center," there could be a group of scribes who make multiple copies as a lector (reader) reads the exemplar for them to duplicate.

    Remember, while this subject is under discussion, that these manuscripts were hand-written, old, weathered, faded, and wrinkled. There were no spaces between words and no punctuation. There was simply nothing pristine or standard about a manuscript!

    Manuscript discrepancies came about in two ways. They occurred either unintentionally or intentionally. The unintentional errors are far easier to spot, and we can understand how these might occur. The simplest are those that occurred when a fatigued or distracted scribe made a simple error by copying the same letter, word, or line twice, or by omitting a letter, word, or line.

    Unintentional Error.  Some unintentional errors could occur because the scribe either misunderstood the word or phrase, or misread the word or phrase. Perhaps the words sounded alike, like "affect" and "effect". Perhaps the word division was misinterpreted because there were no spaces. What does "HEISNOWHERE" mean?

    Unintentional errors could occur because of the marginal notes used by the scribes. At the end of one session, the scribe might have put a mark in the column to indicate where the next session would begin.  When the next session was begun by a different scribe, he might have misinterpreted the mark and begun at an entirely different place, thereby altering the manuscript.

    One or two examples will help.  If two lambdas (l) were written too close together, they could be mistaken for the letter mu (m) as in the case of Codex Augiensis and Codex Boernerianus, both of the ninth century. (Romans 6:5)

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    There are a group of vowels and diphthongs (vowel combination) that came to be pronounced alike. This kind of error is referred to as an itacism when one of the seven is confused with another. In the following example, notice the underlined letters in the Greek, which are the itacisms, and then see how it affects the English translation.

    Certain consonants were interchanged because they sounded alike. In this case, the closing letter of one form and the opening letter of the next (k & s) when combined form the sound of the single letter (as in x). It can be represented as "ek sou" or "ex ou".

A last example. A totally different word can be formed by simply transposing a letter. The results can be devastating to the meaning of a passage.  This example comes from the Codex Bezae and shows a real blunder in John 5:39.

    Intentional Error.  Harder to judge are the intentional errors. These human errors occur because the scribe felt the text needed to be changed. In almost every case, the scribe’s intention was good and he only wanted to "correct" what he felt was error.

    This type of error could occur in many ways. The scribe might have read the words of Jesus in Matthew and felt that the same speech in Luke should read exactly the same. This is the case in Matthew 11:19 and Luke 7:35. In the King James Version (KJV), they read exactly the same, "But wisdom is justified of her children". But the more recent translations exchange the word "works" for the word "children" in Matthew.  Most probably, a scribe changed the word "works" deliberately at some point in history.

    "They write down not what they find but what they think is the meaning; and while they attempt to rectify the errors of others, they merely expose their own". (Jerome, Epist. lxxi.5, Ad Lucinum concerning scribes copying his own works.).

    One more example will be interesting and show how scribes purposefully altered the text of the manuscript they were writing.

    To avoid the implication in Luke 23:32 that Jesus was also a criminal, most Greek scribes changed the sequence of words to solve the difficulty. Of the modern translations, the Revised Standard Version, the New American Standard Bible and the New International Version all follow the largest number of manuscripts instead of the stronger support based on antiquity and on internal evidence.

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    Basic Rules of Textual Criticism.  Over the past few centuries, translators have formulated a set of rules to be used in ruling between variations in the manuscripts.  These rules are not set in stone, but they do serve as general principles. Having said that, the fact is that there are many sets of rules. They do generally put forth the same principles, however, and the list included here contains but a few of the hundreds of rules in a compilation of many lists.

    External Rules (pertaining to the manuscripts themselves)
    1. That reading is best which is supported by the best manuscripts.
    2. That reading is best which is supported by the most geographically diverse manuscripts.
    3. That reading is best which is supported by the earliest manuscripts.
    4. That reading is best which is supported by the most manuscripts.
    5. That reading is best which endured longest in the tradition.

    Internal Rules (pertaining to the text itself)
    1. The shorter reading is best.
    2. The hardest reading is best .
    3. The reading most in accord with the author’s style is best.
    4. The middle reading is best.
    5. The reading which could most easily have given rise to the other readings is best.
    6. The reading which could not have arisen from lectio nary use is best.|
    7. The less familiar reading is best.
    8. The reading which is characteristic of Hellenistic usage is best.
    9. The reading which resembles Semitic usage is best.
    10. The reading which contains unfamiliar words is best.

    Textual Variations.  Textual criticism is the art applied to textual variations. How many variations are there in the text of the Bible? Estimates range from 200,000 to 600,000.  How can there be such a huge number of variations without really affecting the text?  Simply put, the large number is gained by counting all of the variations in all of the manuscripts (some 4,500 of them). If one word is misspelled in 4,000 of the manuscripts, that is 4,000 errors. Really, it is one error that has been copied 3,999 times, but it counts as 4,000 errors.

    One other fact should be emphasized. The large number of variations is in proportion of the number of manuscripts we have. There are more copies of the New Testament than of any other book that was ever produced in antiquity. If we only had 10 manuscripts, the number of variations would be correspondingly small.

    Significance of the variations.  What is the impact of these variations on the text of the Bible. First, we need to define the three types of textual variations classified in relation to their significance for our current New Testament text.

        1. Trivial variations which are of no consequence to the text.  This is, by far, the majority of variations. And examples still form the best way to explain what type of variations are lumped under this category. If we open the Greek text to Matthew, on one page we will find Matthew 11:10-23. A quick look at the bottom of the page shows that nine variant readings are listed. Yet every other variation on the page, besides the intentional error of substituting "works" for "children" in Matthew 11:19, is trivial.  Five concern the omission or addition of such words as "for", "the", "and", etc., and the others have to do with different forms of the same Greek word.

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        This sample page is typical of the "mistakes" found in ancient documents. Very often, there are differences in the spelling of Greek words as they changed over the centuries. After all, think how English has changed since the time of Chaucer. Or a variation may be nothing more than a re-ordering of the words, such as "the Lord Christ Jesus" instead of "Jesus Christ, the Lord". And, even in these cases, there is an abundance of evidence as to which reading is the more accurate.

        2. Substantial variations which are of no consequence to the text.  The second most common type of variation is this one. Not all variations are but one or two words. An entire verse or several verses constitute some. They do not affect our text today however because they are not supported by the most complete and anc ient texts.

        Again, examples will suffice. Codex Bezae of the 5th century, already discussed, has a peculiar reading of Luke 6:5: "On the same day, seeing one working on the sabbath day, he said to him, ‘Man, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed; but if you do not know, you are accursed and a transgressor of the law’". This incident is not recorded in any other manuscript or version. It is no doubt a substantial variation, but we are sure that it was not in Luke’s original gospel.

        A more familiar passage found in early English translations also illustrates the principle. The story of the adulterous woman found in John 7:53 – 8:11 involves a number of verses that is a substantial variation. Almost all recent translations do not include this account. The NIV and ASV separate these verses from the main text and state "The earliest and most reliable manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have John 7:53 – 8:11". The RSV puts the verses in a footnote and explains it there.

        Why are these verses not included in the text?  Because no early manuscript, except one, and practically none of the early versions have this story. The one early manuscript with the story is the Codex Bezae, known for its peculiar readings, such as the one we have already seen in Luke 6:5. In addition, some of the manuscripts that have the reading have marginal notes or footnotes that express doubt as to the validity of the text.  Where did the story come from? No one knows for sure. Perhaps it was an ancient traditio n handed down from the early church. Perhaps it was simply a scribe who wanted to express his opinion.

        I John 5:7 is a less complex example. The KJV reads, "For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one". The story of how this verse ended up in the KJV is an interesting one. After printing was invented, the first man to publish the printed Greek text was Erasmus in 1516. He did not include I John 5:7 in his version. Since the verse was in the Latin version, a controversy arose. Erasmus was so certain he was right that he boasted that he would include the verse in his next edition if only one Greek text was found in which the verse was included. Eventually, one was found and Erasmus kept his promise and included it in his 3rd edition. When the first English edition was published by William Tyndale, he used Erasmus’ 3rd edition as the basis for his translation and included the verse. The KJV used Tyndale as a basis, and so on and so on. So, from that point forward, I John 5:7 was included. The NIV includes this variation in a footnote with the explanation "not found in any Greek manuscript before the 16th century". The ASV simply ignores the variation

        3. Substantial variations which have bearing on our New Testament text.  But there are variations that are significant. These are the most troublesome ones.  Thankfully, there are few.

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